Ben
Brantley

April 30, 2015

For those of you who had been wondering if spring had decided to skip New York this year, there has been a confirmed sighting of that elusive season at Theater for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn. Fresh sap, tickling breezes, blushing blooms — yep, they’re all in evidence. So is the tendency of emerging specimens of human fauna to seize the day as if it were made exclusively for mating. With impeccable timing, Fiasco Theater’s frolicking production of “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” opened on Thursday night, which happened to have been the last day of April. This is a play, after all, that sees “the spring of love” as having “the uncertain glory of an April day,” in which sun and storms jostle for ascendancy. The speaker of those words is one of this slight but pliable comedy’s title characters, though whether he qualifies as a real gentleman has always been open to debate. His name is Proteus, played here by Noah Brody. And in his attitudes, moods and affections, he is easily as variable as April. Still, what do you expect? He’s young, as was Shakespeare when he invented Proteus, in what may have been his first play. Directed by Jessie Austrian and Ben Steinfeld, this “Two Gentlemen of Verona” makes a case for a little-loved comedy as a testament to the charms of vacillating youth, struggling to find its path and its form in the green season.